Claude E. McKinney's fingerprints are all over North Carolina's Research Triangle. He championed the creation of N.C. State University's Centennial Campus in the 1990s. He helped shape the look and feel of Research Triangle Park. And he fought to preserve important elements of downtown Raleigh and Durham.

McKinney was born in Greensboro in 1929 and grew up in several Methodist parsonages in the western and piedmont portions of the state. He pursued undergraduate and graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning a B.A. in painting and design.

After serving in the Navy during the Korean War, McKinney was head of the art department at Livingstone State Teachers College in Alabama (1953-57); civilian designer for the Office of Naval Research (1957-59); vice president and for research at Technical Animations, Inc., Port Washington, New York (1959-68); and design consultant (1968-69) then director (1969-73) of the Urban Life Center in Columbia, Maryland.

In 1973, McKinney was tapped to succeed Henry L. Kamphoefner as Dean of the North Carolina State University School of Design, a position he held until 1988, at which time he became chief planner of North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus. He retired from that post in 2002.

Along the way, McKinney's professional activities in physical planning, design and development have taken him to Korea, Japan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Those interests also led to advisory responsibilities for several new communities, campuses, and urban projects, including the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Downtown Development in Raleigh, Kingsmill-on-the-James in Williamsburg, Virginia and the North Carolina School of Mathematics in Durham and the Research Triangle Park. Other activities in the Triangle included responsibilities as Trustee of the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced Studies and of the National Humanities Center.

McKinney remains married to his wife of over forty years, Mimi, with whom he has had two daughters.